Holy Mountain

May 26, 2009

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Last night I watched the ridiculous film “Holy Mountain”. It’s from the berry berry psychedelic 70s, so you better believe that it’s got nekkid ladies next to a bunch of random ironic and/or critical religious symbolism.

Anywho, I had a dream last night that was inspired by that movie. Mine was better, of course.

In my dream, I joined an elite group of people from the different planets in our solar system on a quest to the edge of the solar system to find the ultimate power over the universe.

(In the movie, an elite group of evil people who embodied different astrological meanings of the different planets joined each other on a quest to the top of the holy mountain to find the ultimate power of immortality).

We all cast off the things that made us elite. We were going to have to master the civilizations of each of the different planets, and rise through the ranks there, starting from nothing. We had to rise far enough to secure passage to the next planet.

There was me, Willow, this giant guy (like 8 feet tall) from Jupiter, Luba (the only fictional person with a name), this one guy who was played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and a few people who never really established their individuality.

We visited a couple of planets that had some challenges. I don’t really remember what they were, but I had the impression that it happened. I think there was a computer problem on one of the planets and I fixed it.

Then we came to this one planet where everybody just kind of farmed and laid around. It was pretty dang easy to farm there, so they just set their crops in the ground and then lied in the sun until the crops were ready. In some ways, it was kinda hard to rise through the ranks of that society, because they didn’t really have a hierarchy. They didn’t really interact very intensely outside their plots of land. It was mostly just isolated communities of people working their plots of land. There wasn’t much reason to trade, because the land provided everything you could want.

Man, we were havin’ a dang good time, I’ll tell you. The giant from Jupiter got ahold of a pennywhistle, and we listened and sometimes danced, and we just ate and had a good time. I was all “Hey, you guys. We’re havin’ a good time here. Why do we need all the power in the universe, when we can just hang out here with each other and have fun?”

Luba was with me. Willow said he wasn’t particularly wedded to the idea of finding the ultimate power over the universe, but he also didn’t want to just stay here forever.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, however, was adamant that we continue on our quest. He was all about finding the ultimate power in the universe.

Ultimately, the others won out, and we resumed our quest.

The next planet we came to was Jupiter. The challenge we faced was that the economy there was terrible! Something about overpopulation. Rich people, we found out, could not get rich people jobs. If they did, they turned out to be actually worse off than middle-class people who got middle-class jobs. Even middle-class jobs were pretty hard to find.

So we decided that the best way to make it through this planet was not to try to rise through the ranks, but to try to be middle class. We all searched the want ads. We all thought the giant would be the one to get a job first, because he was a native. But it was actually Luba who got a job first. She got some kind of an office job. She made enough to just barely support us. We had an apartment and food. None of the others of us ever got jobs, and we kinda got depressed and stopped looking.

Fortunately, we eventually made enough for tickets off-planet, so we went on.

The next planet we came to had an interesting culture: It was populated by a bunch of Godzillas, and the one who was in charge was whoever was the highest. They built these tall tall buildings, so that they could be higher than each other.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s character got an idea of how we could take over that society. We all got together and stood on each other’s shoulders and stuff, and we wore a Godzilla costume. We somehow tricked people (Godzillas) into believing that we were a visiting dignitary from a foreign land. The leader of their society, who lived in the highest tower, came down to street level to formally greet us. At that time, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character whacked the leader over the head with a frying pan and we booked it up the stairs. We won, and were thus the new leader. We ordered the guards to execute the old leader.

At that time, we revealed that we were people and not Godzillas, but what were they going to do? We were up higher than them.

So Jake Gyllenhaal’s character sat up on top of the tower and watched what was going on down below. Unlike the previous leader, he didn’t really care what happened to anybody else, as long as he was in charge. Every night, he had a lady brought up to him, and every morning he pushed her off the tower. The people (Godzillas) hated him. We started to hate him too, but he somehow got us all to fear him as our leader as well. We were fed up!

Luba tried a tactic: She reminded him that we were on a quest for the ultimate power in the universe. She reminded him that as long as we stayed here, we were abandoning our quest. He replied that he did indeed have ultimate power. As a demonstration, he pushed last night’s lady out the window.

Luba saw that there was no reasoning with him, so she tried a desperate tactic. She went to the window and got the attention of all the subjects. The news, the passersby, everybody. They would pay attention to her pronouncements because she was, nominally, at least, a part of the oligarchy that was their leader.

Once she had everybody’s attention, she pulled out a sword and chopped her own head off. Her head fell from the tower.

The people understood: We had ascended the tower as one. We were not, any of us separately, their leader. It was only as one that we were their leader. Because one of us was dead, that meant that the Godzilla that they had seen ascend the tower no longer existed. We were shattered and separate, and we were not their leader. One of our guards, who was a disciple of the original leader, pushed us down the stairs and became the new leader, to the cheers of the crowd.

Well, we still had enough wealth to secure passage to the next planet. We were still very angry with Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, and he felt great shame. He wasn’t ashamed of being so evil. He was ashamed of temporarily abandoning his quest for ultimate power over the universe. He was ashamed that he had been tricked by all that false power.

We discovered these feelings of his when we were waiting at the space-subway stop (it’s a subway when it’s on the planet, but it can and does fly through space). He had been acting ashamed, and we thought he had learned his lesson. When he revealed that he didn’t think that anything he had done as leader was so very wrong, we knew that he would never learn his lesson, and that we could never trust him to wield the ultimate power over the universe, even if we found it.

The giant from Jupiter (who loved Luba very much) ordered Jake Gyllenhaal’s character to lay himself down on the train tracks and be crushed by the train. The giant played on his shame until he was able to convince Jake Gyllenhaal’s character to lay himself on the tracks and be crushed.

So we got on the train. Things were awkward and silent between us. I tried to strike up a conversation with Willow, but he was not in the mood to talk. Instead, I tried to strike up a conversation with a stranger on the train, who was going to the big university on whatever planet we were headed to next. I started to suspect that our next challenge was going to involve a university somehow.

But then my alarm rang and I had to go to the radio station. I’ll probably describe this dream on the air in fifteen minutes.